Ring of Truth

  Susanna had once been married to money. She’d wed a computer start-up whiz, a Californian who had made and lost several fortunes before dying in a rock-climbing accident at the age of fifty.

  “She didn’t talk about Donnie at all,” people at the church said. “It was too painful.”

  The obituary of Donald Scale in the Sacramento Bee portrayed a successful businessman who, like Susanna, had no other names of survivors to list in his death notice. Neighbors in the upscale neighborhood where the Scales lived in their Tudor-style home said the couple kept very much to themselves. Since the yards were large and surrounded by hedges, it was hard to get to know people unless you made a special effort or went to the annual block party. Donnie and Susanna weren’t the sort to frequent such gatherings and nobody made the trek to their home to borrow a cup of sugar and start an acquaintance. By the time of Donnie’s tragic death, all of his former companies had been liquidated—he had taken the cash, planning for an early retirement with Susanna—and the employees were scattered far and wide.

  “She never talked about her past,” people at the church said.

  In many ways, Susanna was much better suited to her first husband, or so it seems now to those who learn the little bits about him that one can learn. He had no children, his parents were also deceased, he’d been an only child with no real talent for friendship, apparently, only for entrepreneurship. Nobody really knew why his widow moved to Bahia Beach, but they said that when she showed up for a meeting of the “grief group” at Sands Gospel, she seemed to be looking for love. They welcomed her, her new minister most warmly of all.

  “Susanna was in his office a lot at first,” Pat Danner says. “I heard crying in there.” She admits that for a little while she feared that Susanna Scale was one of those women—there were a lot of them—who coveted the handsome preacher. “But Bob told me a little about Susanna’s history and I realized she had a right to all the tears and attention she ever needed. After a while, I heard laughter more often than crying, and I felt glad for her, for both of them.”

  Maybe it was only natural that it turned into courtship.

  “I’d say Susanna courted him!” Pat Danner laughs. “For a quiet lady, she could be quite determined, let me tell you. I mean, she was a realtor, so there had to be some backbone there, and some ambition, too. We saw that when she volunteered for the pledge drive. She didn’t give up until she got what she wanted. I’ve seen Susanna turn on the tears for some skinflint member and string out a sob story about the church that you wouldn’t believe, until she had him practically begging her to take his money. She was good, when she set her mind to it.”

  Coincidentally, a tall, good-looking man named Stuart McGregor also came into the “grief group” at about the same time that Susanna did. After her murder, Stuart spoke of how he had watched the melancholy widow turn into a merry wife. “I watched her and Bob meet, I saw them fall in love, I was there for the whole thing, and we all went to their wedding.” And of course, shortly thereafter, the newlywed Wings would return the favor at Stuart’s marriage to Artemis.

  And no one guessed anything was awry with the Wings, until almost a year later, when Violet Lester, Annie Hamilton, and Margo Eby overheard something they were never meant to know.

  * * *

  The day the three women from the church overheard Susanna Wing in a telephone argument with their minister, they were early to a pledge-drive committee meeting at the Wings’ home. There’d been a confusion of times—the ladies thought the meeting was for 9:00 A.M. Susanna, as it turned out, had written it down for 9:30.

  When Susanna didn’t answer Violet’s light knock, the three friends felt perfectly comfortable opening the door and walking on into the little foyer.

  What they heard next paralyzed them with dismay:

  “You’ve already got a wife, and I’m it, or did you forget that minor little detail?”

  It was Susanna’s voice, coming from the kitchen, ringing with anger.

  “You leave me and I’ll get up in the pulpit on Sunday and confess all of your sins! We’ll see how she likes you then! You won’t be leaving me when that happens, she’ll be leaving you! Don’t think you can leave me and stay with her, just because you love her . . .”

  The word “love” was scathing, scalding to her.

  “You love me, remember?”

  Again, they heard “love” drawn up in a furious mockery.

  “You couldn’t live without me, you’d do anything for me, you’d love me forever—remember? And now you just switch all that to her? As if I never existed, as if we aren’t even married?

  “No! Don’t say her name to me! Artemis! Artemis! Stupid name! Stupid woman. Stupid you! How could you let this happen? Love! You don’t love her, you love her money I believed in you, I trusted you, I loved you! How could you?”

  The three visitors, mortified to have overheard Susanna screaming at Bob, and to have heard the awful content of those screams, tiptoed back out to the front stoop. Whitefaced and trembling, they just stared at one another. With unspoken accord, they waited quite a while before Violet dared to press her fìnger to the doorbell. When Susanna came to let them in, she greeted them with a brittle smile that looked just as ghastly as they felt.

  * * *

  The morning of the search for Susanna, the same three women friends from the church took charge of the gifts of food and drink. As they busied themselves in the kitchen, they cocked their ears to what was being said in the other rooms . . . and to what was not being said. Every now and then they looked up at one another, and then immediately dropped their eyes back to their work. Their minister was slumped in an armchair in the living room, waiting for the phone to ring, and none of the three women had been in to see him, to talk to him, or to try to comfort him.

  “We could pray,” one of them suggested to the others.

  “To the same God that allowed this to happen?” retorted the second woman. “No thank you!”

  “God didn’t do this to Susanna,” whispered the third.

  There was a charged silence and their hands got still.

  Finally, one of them made a mundane suggestion that broke the unbearable tension. “You’d better put that potato salad in the refrigerator until closer to lunch time, Annie.”

  Annie Hamilton quietly followed Violet Lester’s suggestion.

  “And the ham salad, Margo, over there—”

  Margo Eby passed the ham salad to Annie Hamilton.

  All three women looked tanned and Florida-healthy in their sandals, shorts, and T-shirts; but otherwise they could hardly have looked more different from one another. Annie Hamilton, the one closest to the refrigerator, was only thirty-eight, but her cropped, prematurely white hair gave her an older, sophisticated appearance that amused her friends, who knew how shy she was.

  She carefully tucked cellophane wrap over the bowl of potato salad before closing the refrigerator door. Then she glanced at Violet Lester, who glanced at Margo Eby, who looked back at Annie Hamilton, completing the circle.

  Violet, known affectionately among them as “the bossy one,” heaved a sigh, and then started emptying yet another grocery sack of foodstuffs brought over by a church member. She was thirty-two, the mother of three, as plump as Annie was thin, with curly black hair and orange lipstick, and she was usually as cheerful as an elf. At this moment, however, she was trying not to burst into tears. She knew if she looked at her friends again she’d lose her composure.

  “You don’t think we ought to say anything?” asked Margo.

  Annie and Violet stared at her, though Violet quickly looked away.

  Margo, the thirty-four-year-old mother of a developmentally disabled child, looked at their expressions and said, “No?”

  “No,” Annie murmured.

  Violet kept her head bowed and didn’t say anything.

  “But what if it would help find Susanna?”

  Nobody said anything for a minute, and then Violet put her face in her
hands and started to cry. Annie dropped everything and hurried to embrace her, and then Margo hurried over, too, and wrapped her arms around both of her friends. When somebody else started to come into the kitchen and saw them, he felt touched by the emotion being shown by Susanna’s friends.

  After a moment, Violet forced herself free of them. Then she turned and faced them, tears still streaming.

  “I’ve already told about it,” she said, with wide eyes.

  “Oh, Violet, no!”

  “I thought we agreed we wouldn’t—”

  But Violet glared at them and said angrily, “How can we not tell what we know? How can we? Our minisiter is having an affair with another woman, and we know it, and we know that Susanna was furious about it, and now she’s missing. How can we keep that a secret? It might have something to do with her being missing.”

  “Oh, Violet,” Annie whispered. “But that would mean—” “I know what it would mean, Annie, and I can’t help that!”

  “You told!” Margo exclaimed, looking horrified. “You told?”

  “We’re not children,” Violet hissed at her. “This is not some little bit of gossip we’re not supposed to repeat. This could be a matter of Susanna’s life or death. We had to tell, or one of us had to. So I did it. Early this morning. I called Tammi Golding, because she knows the chief of police, and I told her the whole thing.”

  “Did she tell the police chief?” Annie looked aghast.

  Violet shrugged angrily. “I don’t know what she did. I just know I had to tell somebody, so I told somebody I thought could make intelligent use of the information.”

  Margo said, thoughtfully, “You know, Susanna could have left him because of it, just left him, you know what I mean? Without telling anybody. This doesn’t necessarily mean that anything bad has happened to her, you know?” “That’s right,” Violet said, with an eager air. “She could have just left, and she did it like this to humiliate him, which God knows he richly deserves. I can’t even stand to look at him in there, pretending to be so pious and so worried about her.”

  Annie walked to the door and opened it a crack.

  She peeked out, and then looked back at her friends. “He does look worried. He looks like he lost his best friend.”

  “She was,” Violet said, tartly. “He just didn’t appreciate it.”

  Annie moved out of the way of the kitchen door just as it swung open.

  A fourth woman stepped through the doorway into the kitchen.

  “Hi,” Artie McGregor said quietly, looking from face to face.

  She was adorable-looking, a doll of a woman with short blond hair and big brown eyes. They had once been tremendously fond of her, but not anymore. She smiled tearfully at the three friends and asked, “Do you need any help in here?”

  For a moment, there was no reply.

  “No,” Margo said carefully, when neither of her friends spoke up. “No thank you, Artie.”

  When they heard the kitchen door swing softly shut behind Artemis McGregor, shy Annie whispered, passionately, “Bitch!”

  * * *

  “Bob, the police are here! Look out the window.”

  At five o’clock on the Saturday afternoon that his wife was missing, the minister rose to his feet so fast he almost lost his balance, and had to catch himself with one hand on the arm of the chair. Church members gathered around him, and together they watched one . . . two . . . three . . . four police officers get out of two cars, slam their doors, gather together on the sidewalk, and talk for a moment. And then one of them—the youngest one—broke away from the other three and began to jog up the front walk.

  He looked as if he couldn’t wait to get there.

  Bob Wing pushed his way through the crowd behind him and ran to open the door. He hurried past the umbrella stand that held his baseball bat. A feeling of relief and celebration began to sweep through the friends and neighbors who crowded in behind him. Why, anybody could tell just from looking at the cops face that this was good news. The best news. They couldn’t wait to hear it.

  “Dr. Wing?”

  “Yes! Have you found my wife?”

  “Yes, sir, we have.”

  Cheering broke out behind Bob Wing’s back.

  Later, the police officer, who had been told to observe closely, would swear that the young, handsome minister looked stunned, as if he had just been given news that couldn’t possibly be true. The other three police officers coming up behind him interpreted the preacher’s reaction in exactly the same way. And, in fact, the Reverend Dr. Robert Wing said to the cop, in a shocked and hollow tone, “You found Susanna?”

  “Yes, sir, we found her.”

  The minister’s knees seemed to give way. He sagged where he stood, though a member of his congregation quickly moved to put an arm under his to support him.

  “I don’t believe it,” Bob Wing said in an incredulous tone of voice.

  It was a dirty trick the Bahia police pulled, and one for which they would be pilloried in the press, in pulpits, and the trial. They didn’t care; as they would say later in their own defense, they had a brutal murder to solve and something important to prove. It wasn’t as if they actually said that Susanna Wing was alive. They only said they had found her. He could have asked them if she was dead or alive, but he didn’t. First he said, “You found Susanna?” And then he said, “I don’t believe it.” It made some people furious, what the police did, but the cops claimed that if they lied, it was only by way of omission. They defended their action by saying they wanted to gauge the reaction of her husband when he heard them say they’d found her. In hindsight, it would seem to be the reaction of someone who had not expected the body to be found, at least not so soon.

  “She’s dead,” the minister stated flatly. “Isn’t she?”

  Behind him a woman gasped, and then cried, “No!”

  “Yes, sir,” the young cop said and then added after an almost imperceptible hesitation, “I’m sorry.” Another pause, and then: “Would you please step out here alone, so that we can tell you about it, and ask you some questions?”

  “Not alone,” asserted Tammi Golding, stepping forward.

  “Am I under arrest?” Bob Wing asked, in an unsteady voice.

  “Arrest?” the young cop repeated, looking surprised. “Why would you think so?”

  “She was murdered, wasn’t she?”

  “Bob!” Tammi said sharply. “With all due respect, shut up.”

  “Yes, she was,” the cop confirmed, while his compatriots remained very still in the background, listening and watching. “But how did you know that?”

  “Bob—” Tammi warned.

  “I just knew it. It had to be something bad. I felt it in my heart.”

  “You think we want to arrest you for the crime, sir?”

  The husband, who hadn’t yet shed a tear over his wife’s death, or even asked where she was killed or how, looked with knowing eyes at the police officer on his front stoop. “It’s usually the husband, isn’t that right?”

  “Quite often,” the cop confirmed in a soft voice.

  “Not this time,” snapped Tammi Golding, stepping forward from her role as concerned friend to her job as criminal defense attorney.

  Susanna

  7

  The morning after finishing my book, I reluctantly roll out of the warm embrace of the naked brown arms of the state attorney for Howard County. It appears I do still have a lover. Apparently he is not high-maintenance. With a sigh for what I’m leaving behind in bed, I heave myself onto the floor. No rest for the weary writer. Or the horny one, for that matter, although that is considerably less of a problem now than it was at this same time yesterday.

  I look back and smile at his sleeping face.

  Franklin DeWeese sleeps with his mouth open.

  It would be precious little on which to blackmail the man, but I haven’t found many other faults, if you don’t count the natural flaws of a born prosecutor. A bit aggressive, the way a Bengal tiger
is a bit aggressive, but no more argumentative and bullheaded than a mama alligator with a nest to protect. A sweetie, really, if you don’t mind brutal truth, or fighting him for every inch he gives you, if you don’t mind being the perpetual defendant in the stand. Every now and then he gives me a break and lets up—like when he’s just won a big case and doesn’t have anything to prove for twenty-four hours or so. But, hey, it’s good mental exercise; almost as good as the other kind I get from him. But, damn, I cannot stand here mooning like this. Got to keep all of the many appointments I have quixotically made for this day: with a homicide detective, an assistant state attorney—as if one prosecutor per day were not enough for any woman—and a reporter.

  “What?” he says, opening an eye and smiling a little.

  “Nothing. I was just enjoying the view.”

  The eye closes, the smile widens.

  “Franklin, would you kill to have me?”

  “Sorry, no,” he says sleepily into his pillow. I return to sit on the edge of the bed, where I can stroke the silky mound of his right shoulder, on down to his bare back. “Mmm,” he says.

  “What do you think that would feel like?” I continue. “To want somebody so bad that you’d kill to have them?”

  “Like sex, I suppose.”

  “You ever get a hint of that kind of sexual obsession off of Artemis McGregor or Bob Wing?”

  He moves his head a little, indicating no.

  “Me neither.” I change my caress to a sharp swat on his butt. “I wouldn’t kill to have you, either.”

  He laughs and darts out a hand to grab me, but I escape.

  * * *

  On my way back into the bedroom after my shower, the phone rings.

  “Marie! I stayed home and read it all day yesterday.”

  My heart goes into overdrive. It’s Charlotte Amstell, my editor. It’s early,- either she’s calling me from her loft in Tribeca or she has subwayed to her office in Midtown Manhattan to break the news to me. Desperately nervous, as if I hadn’t received phone calls like this on every prior book I’ve done, as if I were still the vulnerable beginner that all writers are in our hearts, as if I weren’t as used to hearing good news as I am, I wait for her to say, “It stinks.” Not that she would say it like that; Charlotte’s much too kind for torture, but she’s also much too good at her job to hesitate in going for the kill. If it’s bad, Charlotte says so. She does it nicely, elegantly, but the knife still slices the verbiage clean off the page.